The City & The City

The City & The City
China Mieville
2010, 366 pages

This should be a post about this great detective novel, and so it will be. But first? Let’s stop labeling books that involve anything slightly foreign as “science fiction / fantasy”. There is no science in this book. Nor is this book set in any fantastical universe. But that’s where it is in the book store. And while we’re at it? Let’s stop assuming that books labeled with the science fiction / fantasy tag are somehow inferior to “literature” and get them out of the book snob ghetto. Except for paranormal romance. This book, as far as I’m concerned is a damn fine detective novel, and has no bearing with what I would consider “science fiction”.

But I digress. The book is great. A crime happens in the weirdest city ever, which isn’t really one city but two. Beszel and Ul Qoma are imposed upon each other, with some blocks entirely in one place, other streets being shared between the cities, and sometimes, buildings are shared from floor to floor. Beszel is a city in decline, Ul Qoma is on the rise.

Not only do the citizens of each other live their lives entirely separate from each other, but it is illegal to interact with, or even see, the other city. They unsee. They unsense. They unhear. The citizens themselves enforce themselves, but the mysterious body known as Breach enforce edge cases, traffic accidents and crimes that occur between borders. When an Ul Qoman student shows up dead in Beszel, a detective from Beszel is thrust into an international incident he must cross the border to solve… and lots of intrigue and revelations obviously follows.

The book felt like watching film noir. When I read it, I heard Harrison Ford with a cold narrating. When we were in Beszel, the world was shot in grainy earth tones. When we were in Ul Qoma, the world was full of neon, glass facades and flashing lights. I found myself drawing pictures in my head and then trying to unsee half of the scene. The cities were characters in and of themselves, possibly better than most of the human characters in the book. It was just plain old fascinating. It made me think about the people and places in my own life that I unsee because they make me uncomfortable. But that’s a bit heavy for this post.

Go get this book and read it. It might involve seeing a section of the book store many people often unsee.